Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar - Essays on Poets and Poetry

One of our foremost commentators examines the work of a broad range of English, Irish, and American poets. Helen Vendler's essays, book reviews, and occasional prose from the past two decades, taken together, are an eloquent plea for the centrality-in humanistic study and modern culture-of poetry's subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy.

List of contents

Contents Introduction 1. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: How the Arts Help Us to Live 2. Fin-de-Siècle Lyric: W. B. Yeats and Jorie Graham 3. The Unweary Blues: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 4. The Nothing That Is: Chickamauga, by Charles Wright 5. American X- Rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry 6. The Waste Land: Fragments and Montage 7. The Snow Poems and Garbage: Episodes in A. R. Ammons's Poetics 8. All Her Nomads: Collected Poems, by Amy Clampitt 9. Seamus Heaney and the Oresteia: "Mycenae Lookout" and the Usefulness of Tradition 10. Melville: The Lyric of History 11. Lowell's Persistence: The Forms Depression Makes 12. Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions, Dedicated to Paul Alpers 13. Ardor and Artifice: Merrill's Mozartian Touch 14. The Titles: A. R. Ammons, 1926-2001 15. Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln 16. "Long Pig": The Interconnection of the Exotic, the Dead, and the Fantastic in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop 17. Stevens and Keats's "To Autumn": Reworking the Past 18. "The Circulation of Small Largenesses": Mark Ford and John Ashbery 19. Wallace Stevens: Memory, Dead and Alive 20. Jorie Graham: The Moment of Excess 21. Attention, Shoppers: Where Shall I Wander, by John Ashbery 22. Seamus Heaney's "Sweeney Redivivus": Its Plot and Its Poems 23. The Democratic Eye: A Worldly Country, by John Ashbery 24. Losing the Marbles: James Merrill on Greece 25. Mark Ford: Intriguing, Funny, Prophetic 26. Notes from the Trepidarium: Stay, Illusion, by Lucie Brock-Broido 27. Pried Open for All the World to See: Berryman the Poet Notes Credits Acknowledgments Index

About the author

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Summary

One of our foremost commentators examines the work of a broad range of English, Irish, and American poets. Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose from the past two decades, taken together, are an eloquent plea for the centrality—in humanistic study and modern culture—of poetry’s subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy.

Report

It's one of [Vendler's] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn't a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.
-- Charles Simic New York Review of Books
Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape-I might almost say 'create'-our understanding of poetry in English... Vendler brings fresh insights on Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Bishop, Ammons, Ashbery and others, but the most crucial piece is the title essay, an argument to place the arts at the center of our educational system rather than its periphery: 'After all, it is by their arts that cultures are principally remembered.' And it's through the work of exceptional critics like Vendler that those arts are made negotiable to the cultures that produced them.
-- Joel Brouwer New York Times Book Review
Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made... A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.
-- John Greening Times Literary Supplement
The formidable poetry critic Helen Vendler gathers together over two decades of essays, book reviews, and prose examining a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. Taken together, her writings serve as an eloquent argument for the necessity of poetry both in humanistic study and in modern life.
-- Christine Emba New Criterion
A generous collection of essays spanning 35 years..., by one of our best critics, is an event worth celebrating... Vendler claims, modestly, that readers including herself will always need a path into some poems and poets, and suggests that the function of criticism is to provide such a path. She does this splendidly, and creating such paths for contemporary poets who have not yet accumulated a body of interpretation for their work is a very special gift... These essays will be a pleasure for readers of poetry and a service to the poets Vendler chooses for her close readings.
-- Elizabeth Greene Times Higher Education
A new book by Helen Vendler is always occasion for gratitude, since for more than 50 years she has provided us with the most exacting writing about poetry of any American critic... She is at her best in commentaries on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Berryman... Vendler argues for the centrality of the arts in a humanities curriculum, since their demand for 'subtlety of response' can't be duplicated. Her own essays are a vivid proof of what such response can look like.
-- William H. Pritchard Boston Globe
In this triumphant collection, Vendler reminds us why she is one of the most important living scholars of poetry... This book, with its oceans of depth, reminds us why we need poetry-as well as teachers like Vendler to bring it to transformative life.
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Product details

• Authors: Helen Vendler
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.05.2015
• EAN: 9780674736566
• ISBN: 978-0-674-73656-6
• No. of pages: 464
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Literary studies: poetry and poets